Parliamentary Standards Bill

Like many of these debates, this has been an interesting one. I shall deal with the amendments by grouping them together. First, I accept amendment 9, which was tabled by the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) and my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell), as it is entirely right to add it to the Bill. I accept amendment 11, too, and there should be no argument about that. I shall also accept amendment 10, but I want to add a gloss. Sometimes one has reservations about amendments, although one accepts their overall principle. If there are questions about their drafting or their full impact, one might ask the Member who tabled them to withdraw them and wait for the matter to return at a later stage. On amendment 10, I accept entirely the argument made by the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire that the cases captured by proposed paragraphs (a) and (b) will be relatively trivial and so on, so it would be ridiculous to have the full panoply of a report to the authority without any discretion in the hands of the commissioner. I am therefore going to accept the amendment, but I reserve the right—of course, it will be a matter for the House and the other place—to submit a revised drafting. I will consult the right hon. Gentleman about this, but if a member of the public—and we are not talking about vexatious complaints; if they are vexatious, hopefully they can be dismissed at an early stage—makes a genuine complaint it is important that even if there is no formal report by the commissioner, they are told what has happened. We must check that that is the case. I am thinking of myself, too, because I was the subject of a complaint to the commissioner, which would receive consideration by IPSA, and a complaint was made in respect of a separate matter to the Electoral Commission. It made a difference to me to be able to spell out the conclusion, which was that I could continue to be a Member of Parliament. The most recent complaint was about my repetition of an entirely inadvertent error by my constituency party treasurer, who received a donation that he misrecorded, without misleading anybody—it was from one of two companies owned by the same person—and I repeated the error, because I obtained the information from him. How else could I have obtained it? The newspapers made quite a lot of the fact that I had been referred to the Electoral Commission by a Member of the House, and it took a bit of work to get them to accept that there was a further story, and that I had been cleared by the Electoral Commission. We must bear that in mind. I hope that that deals with those amendments satisfactorily. The right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire and my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough have continued their clean sweep—every one a winner—so I shall now turn to the other amendments. The hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) tabled amendment 45, which states:""The IPSA must ensure that any member who is subject of an investigation is provided with independent advice and counsel on all matters relevant to that investigation."" It is important that we do not over-egg the pudding and seek to provide ourselves—and the implication is that this would be provided free—with something that is not available to others in similar circumstances. The availability of civil legal aid has been restricted for a long time. Although the costs of such aid continue to rise, eligibility, particularly outside the area of family law, is restricted. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) is confirming that that is the case. Civil legal aid is also subject to means-testing, and it would be improper of the House to establish by means of a single amendment—I know that the hon. Member for North Essex does not intend this—a Rolls-Royce of a legal aid scheme for ourselves that is not available to others. We all have constituents in that situation—I have one at the moment—who are subject to a process by their employer that could lead to dismissal and be reputationally terminal. They do not receive legal aid, although they may receive legal assistance from their trade union, so we must bear that in mind in relation to the question of fairness.